Blueprinting the human brain

According to Henry Markham, a scientist working on the Blue Brain project … The project is an attempt to create a blueprint of the human brain to advance cognition research.

The group only recently simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single column in the neocortex, the largest area of the human brain governing high-level thinking and action. (A column typically contains 100,000 neurons.)

“(This) immediately allows us to assess the value of the data to discern, is this something we want to save and analyze later,” he said. “It’s also a lot of fun.”

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With our super computing technologies such as the Blue Gene / L we now for the first time have the ability to do advanced simulations like this. With the full human brain having an estimated computign power on the order of 1 petaOP we are getting closer and closer to a true simulation.

“BlueGene/L boasts a peak speed of over 360 teraOPS, a total memory of 32 tebibytes, total power of 1.5 megawatts, and machine floor space of 2,500 square feet. The full system has 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes. Multiple communications networks enable extreme application scaling”